


A delightful God-fearing man

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Christian Character, Class Issues, M/M, Other Warnings May Apply, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Scottish Character, Social Embarrassment, Songfic, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:07:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23872903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: In the gloomy summer of 1847, after Franklin's death, Irving tries to boost morale bysinging with friends.
Relationships: William Gibson/Lt John Irving
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	A delightful God-fearing man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disenchanted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/gifts).



> \- many happy returns, my dear

Bridgens raised his eyes from his little library ledger with an expression of blood-curdling mildness. It was a virtue in a subordinate steward, Irving supposed, to be able to quell some of the grosser excesses of the cockpit with just a look, but mere insolence to turn it upon a commissioned officer. He must encourage his protégé in the former propensity, while repressing the latter.

The recognition of this new responsibility, along with so many others, prompted him to sharpness. ‘If you have it, Mr Bridgens. Dibdin’s _Songs, Naval and National_.’

‘I do. It’s just—you’ve had it before, sir.’

‘The voyage has lasted two years. I’ve had most things.’

‘Yes, sir. Folk forget what they’ve had, and then they blame me for not telling them.’ Bridgens reached for the plump brown volume, its cover stamped with a triple horn.

‘Well, I believe I retain both my memory and my reason, but in any case because I have the second, I should not reproach another man for the lapse of the first.’

‘I’m sure, sir,’ Bridgens said, with that maddening hangdog smile of his. He held out the book, but when Irving’s fingers were on it did not relinquish his grip. ‘You didn’t like it, as I remember.’

‘Did I no—I mean, no, I didn’t. Not particularly.’

‘Loose and vulgar, I think you said, sir. And—’ he let go suddenly, such that Irving almost rocked backwards on his heels. ‘You said that you never could understand the belief current among Englishmen that one could inoculate against vice, that is, the admission of lesser kinds was proof against the worse. Beer Street, you said, opened onto Gin Lane without a bar.’

The image of the bare-breasted slattern in the centre foreground of that sordid engraving, a foxed copy of which, at the age of fourteen, Irving had bought on a Portsmouth bookstall for a penny and pored over in appalled fascination for three weeks together before burning it in disgust at the schoolroom fire, came vividly before his eyes. He shuddered, wondering what could have possessed him to allude to it in the presence of a steward, maybe even of common seamen. He forced a small dismissive grunt. ‘Did I, really?’

‘I recall it distinctly, as being an average good sort of repartee. Bar, you see, sir.’

‘Yes Bridgens, I do see, thank you.’

‘Very well, sir.’ Bridgens made a note in the ledger. ‘Good day, sir.’

Irving turned, tucking the book into his coat. He remembered Dibdin's songs only as things that, though not much to his taste, might please Billy, and were delightful on that account. The encounter with Bridgens had soured all pleasant anticipation. It had been the most unexpected of brushes with a bugbear which had haunted him since very early manhood: that meeting a beloved friend after a long absence, he should find himself outgrown, surpassed intellectually and morally, no longer able to converse with the dear one on terms of equality. Except that, somehow, now, both friends were himself. That made no sense, he must not, now of all times, begin to think in such a deranged fashion.

He went about the rest of his business upon Erebus irritably, resenting it though it filled the time until he could see Billy again, squeeze in tender greeting the long bony hand (like his sister-in-law's ivory spillikins in their suede bag) read the day’s portion of scripture and discuss it, drink a dish of cocoa, perhaps try one of the more unexceptionable songs from Dibdin, know he was doing some little good to one whose unusually delicate nature put him at risk among men of his own class.

* * *

‘This Jack’s a dull boy.’ Billy touched his tonguetip with the end of his index finger and turned the page, as absent and leisurely as Fagin at his ablutions. ‘All he seems to do is declare his readiness to die for the Crown, fill the flowing bowl, give his last shilling to his shipmate, and repine for his Nancy. It makes you glad of the genuine article—’ he nodded in the direction of some routine uproar in the ship's waist. ‘Almost.’

‘I am glad of them,’ John said, conscientiously. ‘I thank God for their fellowship, every day.’ He caught Billy’s eye, sidelong, and grinned. ‘Almost.’

They met in Billy’s cubicle; John made an uneasy peace with his scruples about visiting his inferiors by keeping the curtain open. He should perhaps have been glad when another joined them—sometimes it was one of the boys, or his venerable countrymen, Berry or Leys—but he was not, not glad at all, when three instead of two gathered in His Name. He thought perhaps he should examine his conscience on the matter, as he had over a similar unworthy feeling on the old _Belvidera_ —of course he would never love Kingston as he did Malcolm, but naming the emotion to himself had made all the difference, and he never again begrudged Kingston his intercourse with his more intimate friend—but they three had been mids together. This was different: even to acknowledge that he was jealous of the society of a steward was to lower himself. But how could any Christian be demeaned by the company he kept, when the Master he followed—but dash it all, Jesus Christ was not a lieutenant in the Royal Navy! And least of all was he a third on a ship harried by ice and the intemperance of her captain, on an expedition haunted by a monster, devastated by the loss of its leader.

Billy always insisted that he stand while John, as ranking officer, sat. So he perched on the cot, occasionally vulnerable to recollective ambush by the incident of its soiling. It was no easy task, to scandalise sailors, but the mind that had contrived this horribly simple expedient had done so upon every point: with filth, with pettiness, with an abominable sense of occasion. Everyone who messed outside the Great Cabin knew who had done it, and no-one wished to clasp the spirit of misrule close enough to see it extinguished. In its admixture of brute and involved cunning, it was not unlike the—

‘—bear? Mr Irving, sir?’

‘I beg your pardon. I was half a world away. What were you saying?’

The lamplight, golden but not warm, highlighted the brass of Billy’s hair and the peculiar planes of his face, his pointed nose and high cheekbones; it cast deep shadows in the hollows beneath. It was hard to believe him only twenty-four years of age, until he spoke: his voice was lightly boyish, and without having any positive halt in it, made you think of someone with crumbs in his mouth. The neck of his shirt was open, and behind the slim pillar of throat that caught the light opened a fathomless cavern, as if no body was there at all, only darkness palpable.

‘Nothing of consequence, sir. Just that the Discovery Service attracts an odd sort. Disappointed men who never gave up hope, but the hope is that the world has more desolation in it that even they can bear. What were _you_ thinking, sir?’ he added quickly, as if anxious to spare an officer the duty of chivvying away the morbs. ‘Or should I say where?’

‘I didn’t mean half a world literally. I try not to, I mean, I don’t find it helps.’

‘No repining for—’ Billy bit his lip. ‘The past. Quite right, sir.’ He clapped the book shut.

‘I’m sorry you didn’t fancy it. A piece of cheerful nonsense. Admiralty issue nonsense, in fact. Morale, and so forth. But I daresay their Lordships weren’t thinking of the eccentricities of the Discovery Service.’

‘Oh no, we’re not all Morfin and his madrigals, sir. And sir, I am grateful. It was a very kindly gesture of yours.’ He placed the book carefully by John’s side. As he straightened, throwing back his head and folding his arms, knee raised and foot against the bulkhead, his neck, shoulders and torso described a serpentine curve. The line of beauty, Hogarth called it, the posture of the queer ragged sign-painter of Beer Street. ‘But—’

‘But.’

‘Well, sir, I prefer modern music. Nothing strenuous, just the popular songs. My uncle’s a victualler, he supplied the Mogul Saloon, on—’ his Adam’s apple, not usually prominent, bobbed into view, ‘Drury Lane. We’re most of us in the catering line, at home. And they’d give him tickets, gratis, for the entertainments, and my cousins would bring me. I’m sure in your eyes that’s very disreputable.’

John was about, albeit charitably and forgivingly, to agree, when he realised he did not know. He had fallen under Malcolm’s evangelical sway when he was not yet sixteen; he had never attended any public recreation. He took for granted that such assemblies were the resorts of the wicked, and that empirical evidence upon the point was superfluous—worse than that, as tending to one’s own corruption, while proving nothing, but that was not the conclusion he would reach on a question of mathematics or natural philosophy. He could have viewed a map or description of the cone of Etna, and not got himself the paralysed duckbill overlip that his beard was at long last growing full enough to obscure, but he should not for all the world, let alone a slightly less idiotic profile, be an explorer from his fireside chair.

‘I have no idea,’ he said simply, wondering if the pleasure he got from the humility of the admission was itself spiritual pride. ‘I’ve never been.’

Billy hid astonishment well, as a steward must, but it was there, in the minute start of every muscle from fluidity to taut attentiveness. The lamp’s flicker played across him differently, and he looked avid, bold: the sort of man who might be first to articulate a desperate predicament and outrageous remedy for it.

‘Well, sir, I would know better now. But much of it was harmless enough. Just what you said, cheerful nonsense. If it would please you move your legs aside, sir, I’ll show you my favourite. I have the music, and though I can’t read it I know it by heart. It was a parting gift from my cousin Fred. I thought he was splendid, sir, he was just that bit older, you know how boys are.’

His shoulder nestled into the back of John’s knee as he bent to one of the drawers built under the cot. Feeling it would be effeminate to flinch from such incidental contact, John did not move, then changed his mind, too late. Billy looked up at him, smiling questioningly, a gaudy sheet in his hands.

The cover showed a pic-nic party under a tree: a swell with a shiny beaver on, his pouter front encased in a waistcoat of violet, red and green tartan, plucked from a teapot a plump toad, displaying it to a young lady in off-the-shoulder mauve, whose pose of alarm sorted ill with her immodest smirk. Other figures in hotch-potches of cheap fashion occupied the middle ground with attitudes of consternation or amusement, an urchin in the fork of a tree frowned down upon the foolishness of grown persons, while a stolid girl-child holding a toy spade gawped from the left foreground. Of all the stupendously ugly composition, this last element was the best observed, embodying the heroic indignation of human dignity forced into lace pantalettes. He thought of his niece, Lewie’s little Mag, who would be about eleven now, and leaving that candid stage of life for demure missishness.

Panic rose for want of something courteous to say about a possession so very prized and so very, very hideous. Then he remarked the shoreline and dunes left background, rather at odds with the legend proclaiming the scene to be set at Hampstead.

Billy laughed. ‘There’s capital bathing in the ponds there, though, sir. And there are lads with asses to ride for a penny.’ He put one knee up on the cot, looking over John’s shoulder. ‘Take a look, sir. It’s a gay tune.’ His exhaled breath touched John’s ear; disconcerted by the proximity, he turned his head and caught the odour of it too, not foul at all, just slightly sour, as preserved food and never quite as much to drink as one would like made everyone’s. ‘It’s quite unexceptionable, sir, unless you take exception to good-natured silliness.’

John’s sight-reading was rusty (though in truth it had never been burnished very high) but the melody was simple to the the point of imbecility. The doggerel lyric told the story of a charabanc excursion to Hampstead Heath, beset by squalling weather and infants, farcical adventures with perambulators and donkeys, and of course, the notorious teapot-dwelling toad. Billy was right: it was quite impossible to dislike. They mumbled along together at first, then chanted in a sort of recitative punctuated by giggles, then finally, as Billy’s light tenor found tentative harmony with his own mid-baritone, positively roared:

Think how tadpoles in tea-cups pluralize  
On a summer’s day!  
Beware of donkeys kicking,  
Or babies on your knee,  
Or toads in teapots sitting  
Come to grief in cold tea leaves!

The last refrain defeated them: they howled, their cheeks wet with a mirth that was not quite sane or steady, but John did not care. What after all was sane or steady in this no-place, this Utopia of which no good could come, this Thule upon which the sun never set, or never rose, this terra nullius, this tabula rasa which erased rather than received the marks of civilisation? He swallowed a bubble of air and wheezed, rocking backwards.

‘Mind yourself, sir!’ Billy caught him by the back of the neck, not quite in time to preserve his head from a sharp crack against the edge of the whatnot mounted above the cot. John blinked hard, returned for a moment to the sort of nursery mishap that was likelier to produce tears of shock than pain. When he opened his eyes a face was looking down into his, bearded and lean, wholly masculine but achingly maternal. He remembered something that Malcolm had once said, which he had disliked very much, not just with his intellect but with his whole body, that Christ must have been the perfect androgyne, manly grace infused with perfect maidenhood, but he liked it now, and wanted it to kiss him goodnight, except it was just Billy’s face, just Gibson—

In his waking contemplations of this mortifying episode, Irving always managed eventually to convince himself that at very least, he had been sitting upright, perhaps even on his feet, before Cornelius Hickey materialised in the doorframe. His dreams, and the drowsy, half-waking states surrounding them, were quite another thing, and the phantasies that proceeded thence too abhorrent to name.

Hickey gave a smile of lavish, aggravated omniscience, accompanied by one of his little _noises_ ; at that moment Irving could have cheerfully subjected him to the death by a thousand cuts.

‘The Captain presents his compliments to Mr Irving and asks that he attend him at his first convenience in the Great Cabin. Hullo, Billy.’

That could only mean that the Captain had, with the dogged perspicacity only available to the thoroughly soused, drawn some salient conclusion from his last stores report that he had himself unaccountably missed.

‘Thank you, Mr Gibson.' he said stiffly. 'I did enjoy our talk today.’

The corner of Billy’s eye remained fixed upon Hickey. He stood almost to attention against the bulkhead. ‘Mr Irving, sir.’

‘Your forehead is cut, sir,’ Hickey said, in a tone indistinguishable, even to Irving, from genuine solicitude. He produced a red and white spotted square. ‘You should bind it up, sir, head wounds bleed like b—’

‘I have my own handkerchief, Mr Hickey!’ Irving bellowed, barging past him.

* * *

On his way forward again, having become the subject of a moderately kindly Ulster ribbing concerning his capacity to break his brow on a ship that was moving only inches a week, though in quite an unseemly direction, and the recipient of orders to interrogate the soundness of over two thousand mute tins, he bumped into Lt Hodgson.

‘Oh, Irving. I’d meant to have a word. I don’t know how to put this, exactly, but perhaps I should just say it out.’ He drew a deep, affable breath, which had the curious effect of reminding Irving in just what contempt the senior young gentlemen of the _Cordelia_ and _Belvidera_ had held a midshipman-by-order inclined to be proud of his second-place medal in mathematics from the Royal Naval College, and Scotch to boot, and boot they most certainly did. ‘I think there’s a feeling that you’ve done all you can for Gibson. Very good of you, considering—well, everything,’ Hodgson gave a small nod, which with seamanlike economy at once encompassed and disavowed detestable actions in the cable tiers and enturded bedclothes. ‘But he must stand on his own feet again. It won’t do anything for his popularity, being seen to be thick with an officer, beyond a certain point. Or yours.’

Irving now understood many things which he had once passionately declared he never wished to understand. But this English delusion, bred in their public schools, that one could stage misdirections for the affections and prejudices of a mass of other men, still eluded him.

‘I’d as lief pray with Billy Gibson as any man else.’ That was a quotation, but he didn’t know from whom or what. He did know, he couldn’t _remember_.

‘Pray?’ Hodgson's fluffy fair jaw twitched in polite incredulity. So the foolish Hampstead song had already reached the wardroom, either literally or metonymically. ‘Look here, I know your religion’s important to you, Irving—’

‘I don’t think,’ Irving said, conscious even as he spoke that he was condemning himself to exile from the wardroom and the loss of precious leisure, and he was tired, so very tired. ‘I do not think the “but” you are about to utter is worthy of a gentleman or a Christian, Mr Hodgson, and if you once reflect upon it, neither will you.’

A turn upon his heel would have taken him the wrong way for the stores, that were now his only happy home, but he managed a tolerably dignified departure. He knew loneliness, on the unpeopled plains of New South Wales, in a ten-gun brig on the roiling North Sea where your tormentors snored eighteen inches from your nose. Here, in this blasted, wasted place, he had the benefits of both.

But neither the constitution nor the upbringing of John Irving predisposed him to entertain self-pity for long. By the time he had been half an hour among the barrels, tins and crates, his head was full of calculations of volume and duration, and a comforting, semi-automatic murmur occupied his lips. Had there been a witness to the scene of necessary, humdrum industry, however, he might have testified that the words were not those of a Psalm, nor a passage from Milton, nor even 'Tom Bowling,' but a kind of ululation, a strange gibberish— _ri-ti-turalise_ …

**Author's Note:**

> The initial idea for this fic came about when I read in Steve Roud's _English Folk Song_ that the Admiralty bought 500 copies of [Songs, Naval and National, by the late Charles Dibdin](https://archive.org/details/songsnavalandna00cruigoog/page/n18/mode/2up/search/hearts+of+oak) in 1841, for distribution across the Fleet. Apart from a handful of good old show-stoppers like 'Tom Bowling', it really is as monotonous as Gibson says.
> 
> I got most of my details of Irving's biography from [Bell's Memoir](https://archive.org/details/cihm_29830/page/n7/mode/2up). For Reasons, I've given him his historical Scottishness and the slight facial disfigurement that he had from being frostbitten when climbing Mt Etna (about which he was very self-conscious).
> 
> Beer Street and Gin Lane: [moralising engravings by William Hogarth](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beer-street-and-Gin-lane.jpg).
> 
> As any ~~fule~~ _Terror_ pedant kno, 'Hampstead is the Place to Ruralise' is quite anachronistic, as it dates from 1861. It's too important to any fic about Irving and song to leave out, though, so I just took the liberty of slightly 1840s-ising the costumes of the figures on the [cover image](https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/vicpopmus/h/015hzz00001773ku00011001.html) of the sheet music. It's just about possible for the Terrors to have been familiar with the proto-music hall of the Mogul Saloon, though music hall proper is really a phenomenon of a decade and more later.
> 
> 'I'd as lief pray with...' is what Dr Johnson said about Christopher Smart.


End file.
